Review: Portrait of a Lady on Fire
by Alyssa Sileo
I have watched my fair share of movies and TV shows, both those with sapphism and sapphic characters, and those that I really wished had sapphism and sapphic characters (and almost did if the authors just reflected the world around them.) Never in my life have I seen something like Portrait of a Lady on Fire, and never in my life have I been so satisfied with a work of art or have felt so seen by it.
Additionally, I am not a film studies major, and I am in the process of taking my first ever Women’s and Gender Studies course. But I think this has been Baby Gay’s First Film Without The Male Gaze. And I feel like I’m on top of the world! Because I have now seen it is possible to watch something about women and not feel like I have to shake off any slimy misogynist ideas thrown at me from the ways filmmakers communicate ideas.
What is the male gaze? From this handy-dandy definition I found on Google, it has to do with the embodiment of the male perspective within the audience of visual media which manifests from how the situations and especially characters are coded, depicted, written, etc. If there’s a woman onscreen and the movie is written from the male gaze, she is likely eroticized and objectified. Think about superhero movies where the men get to be fully armored up, but the women warriors have to wear crop tops and booty shorts and always smile in the middle of battle (and if they aren’t, dudebro fans go ballistic…)
And if these women in these male-gaze-movies are sapphic? They’re depicted as objects for straight male viewer’s enjoyment, and their sapphic identities and journeys are shallow as they can get.
But Portrait of a Lady on Fire is a breath of fresh air and an escape from the harmful ways the male gaze views women and sapphics. The film was written and directed by Céline Sciamma, who is a woman and a sapphic. Even more than that, though, the film’s writing and direction takes special care to be about the women it tells a story about, rather than the ways in which women are categorized in society as compliments towards men and fulfillments of their desires. The film acknowledges history and patterns and at the same time show a more in-depth portrayal of sapphic women and our own wishes and dreams.
This film is about a painter, Marianne, who goes to live with a small family in Western France to paint a portrait of Héloïse. This portrait is meant to be sent to her suitor, and initially, it must be done without Héloïse’s knowledge, since she has not agreed to pose for it. Naturally there’s a love story honeycombed with the beautiful irony of Marianne doing this favor for Héloïse’s future husband but using her own eye and own affection to create this image of the woman. It’s defiant and resistant to the notion that men can have the final say on how women are seen.
When the character’s sapphic identities are revealed, it’s not some exoticized, bombshell idea ushered in by filmmakers who have no strong link to sapphism. It was not to shock viewers, to further “other” sapphism as an “alternate” or “unusual” lifestyle, or to do “something risky” on camera. It wasn’t to “scandalize a younger girl” or to “turn her gay.” Rather, their love was a result of mutual expressions of affection, and a gorgeous portrayal of how sapphics in the olden days found each other.
I connected to this film most intensely with the themes of remembering those who you love in creative ways, especially because your union with them is not possible for social and personal reasons. Marianne’s careful painting of Héloïse and learning her figure and face can struck a chord with me, as a modern sapphic, in the ways that as a Baby Gay I would love the princesses I watched movies about and thought about the fellow classmates I had crushes on. I would doodle, I would write stories, I would imagine movies that I could be in with them. Sapphics have always had to find ways to reconcile our abundant nature of love for others with the lack of ways we’ve been handed to express it. We hold onto our memories for comfort and inspiration. For us, true love is something we feel and act out for ourselves, rather than something we buy into for the way society functions on gender roles and performance. (When Sappho said “someone, I tell you, in another time will remember us,” she meant it!)
I would rant more about this movie, but something tells me I’ll come back soon with another piece about more specific connections I make. The film is a gift that keeps giving and something I will keep watching because it’s, at the same time, a world I live in, and a world that I want the outside world to look more like. Portrait of a Lady on Fire is worth getting the Hulu free trial period. Portrait of a Lady on Fire is worth forgetting that you signed up for the Hulu free trial period, and getting dinged on your card for a month payment. It is that good, I cannot recommend it more highly, and if you love yourself, you gotta see it.
About the Author:
Alyssa Sileo’s Thespian identity comes first and foremost in anything she carries out. As a member of the Drew University Class of 2022, she studies theatre arts, women’s and gender studies, and Spanish. She’s a proud NJ Thespian Alumni and member of their state chapter board. She is the leader of the international performances network The Laramie Project Project, which unites worldwide productions and readings of the acclaimed Tectonic Theater Project play and encourages community-based LGBTQ+ advocacy. Alyssa is humbled to serve as the 2017 Spirit of Matthew Award winner and as a Youth Ambassador for Matthew Shepard Foundation. She believes there is an advocacy platform tucked into every piece of the theatre catalogue and intends to write outreach into the canon.
